Max Weylandt.

Dataset: Namibian National Assembly Elections, 1989-2019

30 September, 2024

This is a bit of a labor of love. The Namibian Electoral Commission has done a pretty poor job at making election results available. For elections to the National Assembly – the primary legislative body – the results section of its website currently provides only results for 2014 and 2019. The former is a pdf of a spreadsheet saved in portrait format, the latter is a speech giving nationwide totals per party, while constituency-level results are in an annual report in a different section of the website.

Other years’ results have sporadically been online, only to disappear again. The modal form of delivery is pdf, with the occasional .xls spreadsheet thrown in. For 2004, I had to physically go to the Electoral Commission’s Headquarters to scan results. In short, until now this data was somewhere between difficult and impossible to get, and in a mess of different formats.

I’m happy to report that I have compiled a dataset of constituency-level election results for every election since 1999. (For 1994 it includes data at the regional level, and for 1989’s constituency assembly election it includes voting districts). This data is archived at the Harvard Dataverse here.

Aside from each party’s vote tally for each constituency, it also includes total registered voters (allowing for turnout calculations), invalid votes (where available), and the total number of seats won by that party in that election.

This should be a useful dataset for students of Namibian electoral politics. The constituency level is the lowest level of aggregation for other important data on Namibia, like census information. The Afrobarometer survey reports respondents’ constituency in some rounds as well, so there are lots of interesting things to explore.

This dataset is the first entry in what I hope to be a thorough collection of datasets in the Namibian Politics Dataverse. Constituency-Level Presidential results are next, followed by Regional Council and Local Authority elections if there’s interest.

It is freely accessible, though please cite if you do use it:

Weylandt, Maximilian, 2024, “Namibian National Assembly Election Results 1989-2019”, https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/FXKZLF, Harvard Dataverse, V1

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